Author's Notes: I wrote
this a few months ago, Kyle-style (as I called it at the time), and have since
done some editing, revisions... and decided it still sucked. Nonetheless, this story exists now, so I
figured I should do something with it before it sucked all the fun out of my
hard drive. Quite frankly, it's an
introspective bit on a pre-Gravitation Eiri.
It was an experiment, I suppose, and I guess it turned out all
right. I accomplished everything I
wanted to accomplish with it, I mean.
And that's good enough for me.

-

By the age of seventeen, he had turned to alcohol to keep
his problems from seeming so enormous and it had worked well. Too well,
perhaps. He kept the habit going by taking cans of beer from his father's
refrigerator, two or three at time, and hording them in his bedroom. His father
never seemed to notice. That, perhaps, was one of the problems he was trying to
drown away in his drinking. When he came of the age to buy his own liquor
legally, he was already living on his own and yet continued to hide the cans
and the bottles for months before he realized such precautions were no longer
necessary.

He didn't like to eat. Food had
stopped tasting good to him years ago, even before he began drinking, and so he
had simply quit. When the hunger became too much for him to bear, he would call
for take-out or he would make a quick run to the store so that he could cook
for himself. He preferred the latter because it gave him something to do with
his hands. When his family came by, which was rare, or when he saw his friends,
of which there were few, they urged him to stop cooking and stick with the
take-out. He was a good cook, they knew, but they worried because he always
drank while he cooked; they feared he would one day lose track of his hands and
kill himself via the cooking, one way or another.

He never kept leftovers; the
sight of the containers taking up so much beer-space in his refrigerator
maddened him. He would throw out leftover food instead. He didn't care. He had
no real reason to care.

The smoking began before the
drinking, but it was a spastic habit at best; he would smoke on and off and on
again. One day he would smoke several packs, the next he wouldn't touch the
things. Such days became less and less frequent, though, and by the time he
turned twenty-one he was, in fact, a chain smoker. It was not an addiction, he
felt, so much as it was a hobby.

Psychiatry had been forced upon
him and he had been put into a mental institution for well over a year soon
after his sixteenth birthday. He had been released into the care of a reputed
therapist afterward, and the weekly meetings soon became the bane of his
existence. When his doctor suggested that he find something to do with his time
other than drinking and smoking, however, he took heed and turned into his own
head, locked some doors, opened others, and regurgitated his thoughts onto
paper. He went back to the scribblings later and put happy spins on the bad
bits and sad spins on the good. One of his friends found it later on and
submitted the work to a publishing company, where it was made into a novel and
sold throughout the country.

Off of this, he made his fortune.
He became a literary sensation almost overnight and slowly found that writing
kept him occupied, that it kept him from remembering things... and that he
enjoyed it. He had, once, considered taking writing up as a career, but
circumstances had changed his mind for him. Now his life was doubling back on
him, and, he found, it wasn't all that terrible.

With his success came fame, and
glory. A different girl graced his bed each night and he rarely left his house
without a woman on each arm, doting over him. The people loved him, but he
could not love them in return. He distanced himself as best he could, avoiding
most all people except when it came time for a quick romp in the bedroom or a
publicity stint for his novels. No one seemed to mind; they called him
eccentric and that only added to his appeal.

The book was published under a
name that was not his own, and slowly the boy he had been once upon a time died
and the man he did not want to become grew stronger. It was, he felt, about
time.

The years dragged on.

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